News

Twitter and Azul Systems have been elected to serve on the JCP Executive Committee for Java SE/EE, on voting percentages of 32% and 19% respectively. Both firms have also joined the OpenJDK project. VMware is no longer represented.

Clojure is rather new member of the LISP family of languages which runs on the Java platform. Introduced in 2007 it has generated a lot of interest. InfoQ had a small Q&A with James Reeves and Christophe Grand, the creators of Enlive and Compojure, about their projects and their experiences working with Clojure.

Last week, Oracle released Java7 to great acclaim. However, an issue identified by the Apache Lucene project pointed to a specific hotspot optimisation bug which kicks in when a loop is executed more than 10,000 times. How serious is this issue, and does it warrant the kind of negative press that has been played out over the last few days?

So far, Kotlin has been primarily known as a Russian island thirty kilometers west of Saint Petersburg. More recently, the Czech company JetBrains introduced a programming language named Kotlin running on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). It is the intent of the Kotlin language developers to get rid of some challenges in the Java language.

Gavin King, creator of Hibernate, gave a presentation at QCon Beijing on the Ceylon JVM language. Ceylon addresses some limitations of the Java programming language although the project is near the inception phase, with no compiler or IDE support. Since its existence leaked out over twitter, there has been a lot of speculation about the language; read on to find out more from Gavin King

Microsoft researcher Holly Stewart highlighted last week that Java has recently surged ahead of Adobe Acrobat as a favorite target for hackers wanting to take over computers. InfoQ looks at the specific exploits used as well as which patch of Java fixes them.

Azul’s Zing is generally available from today, bringing their highly-scalable Java architecture to x86-based servers. InfoQ spoke to George Gould and Gil Tene about the launch, performance figures and licensing costs.

The LLVM team yesterday released LLVM 2.8, the low-level virtual machine infrastructure that includes a next-generation C/C++ compiler, optimiser, and run-time. In addition, the LLVM also sports a VMKit for CLR and JVM runtime and is used in tools as diverse as MacRuby and Python's Unladen Swallow. Additionally, the recently-released Mono 2.8 has a mono-llvm runtime. So what's new in LLVM 2.8?

At Monday's JavaOne keynote in San Francisco, Oracle EVP Thomas Kurian highlighted Oracle's plans for the Java platform with a three-year roadmap and demos of JavaFX and other technologies. Elsewhere it announced plans for JavaFX 2.0 and the decision to drop JavaFX Script.

Azul Systems, makers of specialist hardware for running Java applications, have announced Zing, a Virtualised implementation of their hardware stack. Zing uses RedHat's KVM and VMWare's vSphere to target a wide range of operating systems and is optimised for Intel's latest x86

Having just announced a record breaking quarter, Azul Systems are open sourcing a considerable part of their intellectual property under GPLV2, as part of a major new initiative to try and improve the performance of managed code on commodity platforms.

The strong correlation between heap size and garbage collection pause time is becoming one of the major limitations to Java application scalability, and a great deal of R&D effort is going into trying to remedy the situation. InfoQ talked to Dr. Cliff Click, former architect and lead developer of the HotSpot Server Compiler and now chief JVM Architect at Azul Systems, about Azul's solution.

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